User:Drmaik/arabic

intro

As Islam's liturgical langauge, Arabic has lent many words to other Islamic languages, akin to the lexifying role Latin has in Wetern Europe. During the Middle Ages Arabic was also a major vehicle of culture, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy, with the result that many European languages have also borrowed numerous words from it.

The influence of Arabic on other languages

• para* from current intro. However, the influence of Arabic has been much more profound in those countries dominated by Islam or Islamic power, being the major source of vocabulary for languages as diverse as Berber, Farsi and Swahili, and the main external source for Urdu, spoken Hindi, Turkish, Malay, Indonesian, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. For example the Arabic word for book /kita:b/ is used in all the languages listed apart from Malay and Indonesian. Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle}, along with Swahili, borrow numbers from Arabic. And most religious terms used by Muslims around the world are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as salat 'prayer' and imam 'prayer leader'.

The history of Arabic

The earliest Proto-Arabic, or Ancient North Arabian, texts are the Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, from the 8th century BC, written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor in its Nabataean ancestor, but in variants of the epigraphic South Arabian musnad. These are followed by 6th-century BC Lihyanite texts from southeastern Saudi Arabia and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and the Sinai, and not in reality connected with Thamud. Later come the Safaitic inscriptions beginning in the 1st century BC, and the many Arabic personal names attested in Nabataean inscriptions (which are, however, written in Aramaic). From about the 2nd century BC, a few inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (near Sulayyil) reveal a dialect which is no longer considered "Proto-Arabic", but Pre-Classical Arabic.

By the fourth century AD, the Arab kingdoms of the Lakhmids in southern Iraq, the Ghassanids in southern Syria the Kindite Kingdom emerged in Central Arabia. Their courts were responsible for some notable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and for some of the few surviving pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet.

All contemporary Arabs were considered as descended from two ancestors, Qahtan and Adnan, of which Qahtan was related to the "lost Arabs", and the Southern Arabs were identified as of his lineage, regarded as the "real Arabs", al-ʿArab al-ʿariba, while the Northern Arabs, including the tribes of Mecca, were considered the descendants of Adnan, in Islamic tradition traced back to Ismail son of Abraham, said to have been arabized at a later period.

Versteegh (1997) is uncertain whether to ascribe this distinction to the memory of a real difference of origin of the two groups, but it is certain that the difference was strongly felt in early Islamic times, even in Islamic Spain, there was enmity between the Qays of the Northern and the Kalb of the Southern group. The so-called Himyarite language described by Al-Hamdani (died 946) appears to be a special case of language contact between the two groups, an originally North Arabic dialect spoken in the South, and influenced by Old South Arabic.